Thursday, September 4, 2008

The Adventure - Day 5

File Under: Homeward Bound

All good things must come to an end. We awoke early Thursday morning, all of us in kind of a daze from the excitement of the previous days. The only theme park we would see would be Orlando International Airport, the only ride we would (hopefully) get on would be Southwest Airlines flight # 2002. With the weather being what it was, we wondered if we would leave on time. We ate breakfast, some enjoyed the last of that beautiful chocolate cake while others ate cheese and crackers, Oreo cookies and Pop Tarts (guilty!). Yes, an unusual diet considering we were cleaning and figured it would all get thrown out anyway. Sadly we left about 1/3 of a bottle of vodka. Oh well.

Cleaned up and packed, eventually we were all ready to go. The ride to the airport was completely uneventful. Traffic was light, the weather wasn't miserable, just gloomy with brief periods of rain.

At the airport we were pleased to find that our flight was scheduled to depart on time. We grabbed some lunch, then sat around for a while, all of us were pretty quiet. Tina was checking emails, Polo was reading magazines, Dan and I were on our computers. That was my first opportunity to log on to the internet since early Sunday morning. The feeling of being disconnected for so long is weird. Kind of like a junkie craving a fix. Not that I've ever been a junkie. ;)

The flight started off kind of rough but once we leveled off it was fine. I passed the time by watching a few episodes of "Square Pegs." Tina and Polo read and slept. Dan, Luis and Denise were a few rows ahead of us and were well behaved as we didn't hear a peep out of them.

We landed, gathered our bags and went our separate ways at the airport. Tina was parked out there, she drove Denise and I home. Dan, Luis and Polo hailed a cab.

In all, it was an amazing trip. It took me three days to process it all once I got home. Everything was in high-speed. I'm amazed that the group of us travel so well together. Admittedly I get a bit snippy at time and towards the end I barked more than once. But, we all came back with the same number of fingers and toes that we started with and there were no visible bruises.

I'm blessed to have such great friends and I love them very much. Special thanks to Dan for having a 40th birthday. :)